Review : Engineering a nation

The Innovators: The Engineering Pioneers Who Made America Modern by David Billington, Wiley, $24.95, ISBN 0 471 14026 0

A HEROIC history of American engineering and industrial development between 1776 and 1883 greets the reader of David Billington's The Innovators. The pioneers of engineering on show here range from the familiar, like Robert Fulton and Thomas Edison, to the less well-known such as James B. Francis, whose work on hydraulic turbines at Lowell, Massachusetts, helped to revolutionise the industrial power network, and J. Edgar Thomson, whose integrated view of technology and business built the Pennsylvania Railroad.

But the book is far more. Billington has traced the history of American engineering from its roots in the Industrial Revolution, and such giants as James Watt, Thomas Telford, and Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He shows with a rare deftness how the history of a nation and the history of its engineering are inseparable.

Billington, ...

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